A Mayor Favorite No More: Anthony Weiner

The thing I can’t get out of my mind about Anthony Weiner is the fact that all the politicians on both sides of the aisle considered him a rising star. The Democrats loved him for his smarts and his wit. The Republicans hated him for his standing up to them. He was considered the leading contender in the race to become Mayor of New York City until the recent events of the past two weeks. He was also considered as a possible future Governor or even President of the United States. He is only 46 years old after all.

What he did does not matter. It’s what he did after what he did. I can’t believe how he handled this. This man is one of the stupidest people on the planet. It makes no sense. [expand]
The first stupid thing he did, you may have heard, was press the wrong button on his computer. He intended to send a picture of himself with a bulge in his underpants to a 21-year-old woman in Seattle. Instead, he pressed the SEND ALL button and the picture went out to each of the 40,000 people who were following him on Twitter.

What Weiner was doing, of course, was blowing off sexual steam with pretty young women over the age of 18, well almost all over, who had chatted him up on the Internet because he was a Congressman. He never followed up on any of it. (His wife was not shocked. He had told her about this hobby.) And the women, fully consenting adults, seemed to like it too. All of them chatted back to him tit for tat. None of them ran to the authorities or went on CNN about him.

Here’s some of this conversation. “Ridiculous bulge in my shorts now. Wanna see?” “Yeah! Can u send a pic? I want to sit on your xxxx so bad right now.”

Embedded in there is his second stupid mistake, which was that he positively identified himself as Congressman Anthony Weiner rather than, say, Ramone Haberdashery. Had it not occurred to him that this could ruin his career?

Let’s go on to number three.

Number three is that, having realized he had pressed the wrong button, he didn’t send a follow-up message just saying he had mistakenly sent off a picture he’d accidentally taken of himself when he was holding the camera wrong. Should have deleted it. Forgot. Ha ha. We’ve all seen the underpants picture. And we’ve all seen naked pictures of this part of the male body. Isn’t there a TV show called “Hung” about this very thing? People would get over it. There’s no money in trying to sell CNN a Congressman’s errant photo of himself in underpants. Until now.

Instead of doing something as simple as this though, Weiner embarked on his fourth dumb thing, which was to make a big deal about it, howling loudly that somebody had hacked his identity. It called additional attention to himself.

Weiner’s fifth dumb thing I think probably took place when he got advice from a very bad lawyer.If asked about this, this lawyer must have said, hedge your bets. Don’t say it was or wasn’t your underpants. If you say it wasn’t and at a later date you have to appear before a Congressional committee and they can prove you have been lying you will be put in jail for years for perjury. And even I could not get you out.
“Was that, in fact a picture you took that got sent out on the Internet?”

“Well, we’re going to try to find out exactly what happened. The photograph does not look familiar to me.”

“Is that you?”

“I can’t tell for certitude.”

“But is that a picture you took of yourself?”

“This was a hoax. It was committed on me. It was easy to do, making fun of my name. I’ve hired a private security firm to get to the bottom of the photograph and make sure it does not happen again. This is not a national security matter. I’m not really sure it rises, no pun intended, to that level of seriousness.”

Next we come to dumb thing number six.

After all that, Weiner fesses up. Yes he’d been having sexy conversations with women on the Internet. But he had not broken any law. The only law you could hold him accountable for was that he might have used taxpayer funded government computers to do what he did.

“I only did this stuff at home,” he said.

But then some of the women he’d been involved with sold pictures to a magazine showing him sitting at his computer facing the computer camera with all sorts of photographs of him and his family on a wall unit behind him. It’s at the office.

Did I mention that I know a friend who has a friend who knows a man who’s mother named him, at birth,

Seymour. Last name Weiner.

What kind of mother would do that?

As we go to press, Congressman Weiner has entered a sex rehabilitation clinic. If history is our guide, and history often repeats itself, it will ruin his golf game. [/expand]